Читать книгу Gerald Cranston's Lady - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 25

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For a moment, leaning back against the Bedford cord upholstery, the chairman of Cranston’s, Limited, allowed his mind to dwell on 15-A Aldford Street. “Have to give a house-warming once we’re in,” he thought. Then, according to custom, he dismissed the job done for the job-to-do, and concentrated.

So intensive was that concentration that Tillotson, had he not been familiar with his employer’s habits, might have thought him smitten with sudden illness. He no longer leaned against the upholstery of the landaulette but sat bolt upright, his bowler-hat thrust back from his fine forehead, his big hands deep in the pockets of his long blue overcoat, his mouth set, and the pupils of his blue eyes shrunk to needle-points.

The car—now slowing, now hastening—traversed Oxford Street, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Holborn; but still that set mouth made no comment on its progress, and still those blue eyes were blind to the passed and passing traffic, to the shop-fronts, bright illuminated against fog and rain-drizzle, and the umbrellaed foot-folk on either side.

At last, however, as Havers throttled to speed along the viaduct, those eyes took cognizance of their whereabouts and that set mouth opened for speech. “Tillotson!” it said. “Tillotson! Those notes I dictated last night. Are they ready?”

“I have them here, sir.” Stanley Tillotson drew up a governmental-looking despatch-box from between his feet, unlocked it, lifted the lid, and pulled out a dozen sheets of typed foolscap, bound at the side with three brass paper-clips.

“Thanks.” Cranston, removing both hands from his over-coat-pockets, took the document and began to study it—was still studying it when the car made gray Old Broad Street and, turning left out of Old Broad Street, the big office-building of Pinner’s Court. “I’ll telephone when you’re to fetch me,” he told Havers; and, acknowledging a commissionaire’s salute with his usual deliberateness, strode—Tillotson, despatch-case in hand, limping after—through the wide doorway toward the lift.

The lift-porter, also saluting, crashed his gate home—to decant them, after various stoppages, at the very top of the big building, opposite a modest door, on whose frosted glass upper panel there showed in gilt letters the words: “Cranston’s, Limited, Leicester. London Offices.”

The Lady Hermione’s husband, the document still in his hands and his secretary still limping after, pushed his way through that glass door; and, with hardly a glance at the half-dozen clerks seated high at the sloped mahogany desks of the outer office, passed into his own sanctum.

As its occupant clicked on the holophane ceiling-light, one saw that there was little luxury about this sanctum. Its three narrow windows gave curtainless upon chimneys and the foggy sky. Two of its green-distempered walls were entirely innocent of pictures, while the others contented themselves with a scale-plan of a “Bord & Pillar” colliery-working, a blue-print of a corn-mill, and various graphs showing the weekly fluctuations of flour and coal. A red and blue Axminster carpet covered the center of the hardwood floor. The furniture consisted of a green leather-covered sofa, four perfectly plain bass-wood chairs, a waste-paper-basket, a padded revolving office-chair, and a large flat-topped oak desk, complete with telephone, desk-transmitter, and reading-lamp.

Said Gerald Cranston, seating himself at his desk and illuminating the reading-lamp: “Get on with those letters I gave you after breakfast, please. And send Parker here immediately.”

A moment later John Parker—an alert middle-aged man, waxed of mustache and blue-suited, who fulfilled the double function of secretary to Cranston’s, Limited, and second secretary to its chairman—came briskly into the room.

“Good morning, sir,” said Parker.

“Morning, Parker.” Cranston’s eyes were on the document, so that the other saw only the tawny-reddish top of his bent head. “Bring me a copy of the last balance-sheet, the auditors’ report on the half-year’s trading, and the detailed accounts. Are all the directors coming to the meeting?”

“I fancy so, sir.”

“Good.”

Parker vanished, to reappear with a thick wad of papers, which he laid on the desk. As soon as the door closed behind him, Cranston, lifting his head for a second or so, began searching among the papers and, finding what he wanted, resumed study.

But even while his brain absorbed, analyzed, mastered mathematics, that other faculty in him, the imaginative, was at work, so that he saw, as it were behind the written figures, the men and the things of which they were the symbols.

Corn-sowing, he saw—and the wheat sprouting to ear; and his machinery reaping, binding, shocking, winnowing the wheat; and farmers’ carts piled high; and the mill-wheels grinding. Nitrate fields, he saw, rainless in torrid sunshine beyond Iquique; and ships freighting him the nitrates; and the linseed wharves; and presses pulping the linseed for his cattle-cakes. Posters, he saw, huge posters flaring from Wash to Bristol Channel; and lorries; and the men who drove the lorries; and the depots whence the lorries drew their loads; and the shops and the houses and the farmsteads whereto they delivered them.

Then, as brain and eyes concentrated on the papers he had deliberately left till last, imagination changed its pictures.

For neither corn nor farm machinery, neither nitrates nor linseeds, neither its posters nor its lorries, were the life-blood of Cranston’s, the black and the boundless energy at heart of this lusty many-limbed giant which its chairman had brought to creation. That life-blood, that black and boundless energy at heart of Gerald Cranston’s creation, was Coal. And now, now while the tentacles of his brain fastened on the last of the figures—now while, sum by bewildering sum, he compared, checked, collated them against the words and the figures in the brass-clipped document from Tillotson’s despatch-case—that other faculty in him pictured only the coal-getting.

Shaft-sinking, it pictured—gelignite blasting, and hammer-drills boring to the “stone-head,” and the bricking-ring following the hammer-drill, and the turbine-pump sinking deep and deeper into the bricking-ring from its wheel-topped head-gear. Sunk shafts, it pictured—upcast shafts and downcast shafts, and the cage-chains clanking as the last of the cage-rope reeled to the winding-drum, and the full tubs rising and the empty descending, and the miners’ eyes as the cage-doors closed on them. Below ground, it pictured—where the lamps glimmered along the pit-propped galleries, and the disk machines whirled against the under-cut coal-face, and the shot-firers knelt to stem their charges, and the shot mass toppled, and the colliers broke it, and the putters filled their tubs for the ponies, and the tubs moved endless on the double-tracked haulage-roads. Above ground, it pictured—the engine-house and the pump-men, the dynamos whirring as they drove the ventilating-plant, and the mined coal falling through screen to tippler, and the grimed hands busied at the moving picking-belt....

Till at last, that imagination which is almost poetry flickered out, leaving only ciphers, cold, mathematical ciphers, in Gerald Cranston’s brain.

For a little while longer he conned those ciphers. Then sweeping the papers that contained them out of reach, he leaned back in his chair and laughed the little self-satisfied laugh of the man who finds his work good. Cranston’s, Limited, was big, sound, prosperous. Give him but his own way, and he, its creator, would make it bigger, sounder, more prosperous yet.

So—self-satisfied, self-determined—Harold Cranston found his younger brother, when, a bare half-hour before the board meeting which had summoned him to London, he came unannounced into the sanctum.

“Train was late,” began Harold. “How are you, old man? How’s marriage?”

Harold Cranston’s younger brother, however, was in no mood for gossip. “Never mind about my marriage. Just run your eye through that,” he said, pushing the brass-clipped document across the desk. “I want your opinion on it before these directors of ours arrive.”

Reading, a puzzled look came over Harold’s face, and the rough, bristly mustache on his upper lip began to quiver; till finally, the puzzlement changed to panic.

“I say——” he began, glancing across the desk with a startled query in his gray-green eyes.

But Cranston, with a terse, “Finish it first, Harry,” cut short the query; and after a moment’s pause the managing director of Cranston’s, Limited, reconcentrated on his panicking task. When he had finished it, perspiration shone beady above the rims of his glasses.

“Well,” he said, handing back the document, “well, I’ll be damned.”

“You don’t approve of my scheme, then?”

“Approve of it!” The elder brother’s tone was three notes above his normal. “I should think not.”

“Why?”

“Because”—Harold’s voice came back to the normal, but his hands shook as he spoke—“to begin with, it’ll lose us every factor on our books—and every merchant, too.”

“Precisely. And what difference will that make?”

“Every difference. We can’t do without the middleman.”

“I say that we not only can do without them”—Cranston’s jaw set obstinately—“but that we must.”

“Even if we can, where’s the money to come from? As I understand your idea for the future, it’s to increase our colliery output by five hundred tons a day, establish depots all over London, and, instead of marketing our household coal at the pit-head, sell it direct to the consumer. To do that will mean more capital.”

“Never you mind about the capital, Harry. Finding capital’s my job, not yours. And for goodness’ sake, don’t worry your head about the increased output. That’s a side issue. Once this temporary shortage is over, we’ll have our work cut out to market what we’re getting up now.”

“Well”—Harold, hedging, fingered his mustache—“you may be right. The export boom can’t last; this embargo alone will kill it. And, of course, as far as the Midlands go, we always used to market most of our domestic stuff direct. But the provinces ain’t London!”

“Exactly.” And Gerald plunged into technicalities, ending, “That’s why we’ve got to have the London depots.”

“Of course,” Harold, half-convinced, hedged again; “you’ve studied the business, and I haven’t. All I’ve got to say is that the thing’s too big a gamble. When decontrol comes—if it ever does—we’d far better go on as we always have done, selling to the factors.”

“Letting them and the merchants take the best of the profit.”

“They don’t get more than a bob a ton.”

“Don’t they?”

And Gerald Cranston grinned.